New Software!

On Friday us people in Finland began on our annual 'Ski Holiday', which basically means a week off of school with lots and lots of skiing and ice skating either here in Finland or somewhere else where you've got a lot of snow to downhill ski. Now, last week my Painter X3 trial expired, so I wanted to get some work done before it would expire so that I wouldn't have anything unfinished for the next week or so because I'm waiting on my licensed version of the software to arrive.

 I had planned everything well for Monday and Tuesday to work on the Indian kid 'project' since I had two days left after Sunday to work on the Painter. I ensure you, I did work on it all day Monday and as I closed the program after a good day's work, little did I know that the 1 day I thought I had left and what the program had told me was indeed not true when I came home from my studies on Tuesday. So, I was left with little option to continue and I have to say I'm a bit skeptical about the Photoshop for painting pictures. Anyways, for the rest of the week I've been caught up in school work and this sort of 'Senior Prom' that was going on just a few days ago. Not that I attended, but it was quite hectic for awhile there. 

Anyway, yesterday afternoon I decided to download the Adobe Photoshop Elements, just to get a feel of what it is about and I didn't feel confident enough to download the full on trial version of the Photoshop for the time being. I'll get onto that later, all in all Elements is just a cut down version of the Photoshop just as Painter Lite was to Painter X3. 

For now, I'll just walk you through on what I did on Monday before my Painter expired:

To jog your memory once again, here is the work I was left off with last Sunday. 

Figure 1

Alright, so from here I had to bite the bullet and begin on the 'hairy' of the headdress. I started on this by darkening the bases of the hair and lightening the tips to show where the hair begins and ends and where the feathers enter. Here I use a larger brush because I am in no need of strong detail just yet. 

Figure 1.1

While I was getting into the fur on the headdress, I got extremely distracted as usual and I started putting detail into the headband of the headdress making it darker and giving it a more grainy look instead of a smooth one that it used to show. I also added quite a few wrinkles all around before I could find myself satisfied with the outcome. I used the Airbrush of size 4-5 and turned the opacity down to almost less than half just to gradually darken the color of the headband. I thought this would give the work more contrast and impact overall, I felt it was looking a little bland previously as you can see on the first picture. Below you can see my progress on the headdress more clearly. 

Figure 1.2

After being satisfied with the headband, I began concentrating on the fur again which I really did find quite challenging. It was very difficult making the fur look somewhat real and as it were floating in the air and honestly I'm still not quite sure if I've succeeded. However, after getting the base colors right I could begin on the smaller details and thus I decreased the size of my Airbrush to about 2-3 and began altering the shapes and directions of the hairs to bring them out a bit. I don't wish this part to bee overly detailed, this could take away from the overall composure. I still want the face and the feathers in front to be the main focal point. 

Figure 1.3

After a few hours of work I began to get frustrated on the immense amount of hairs I was supposed to be working on and I decided to distract myself again for a bit and I found some flaws around the picture which I tightened up around the face and added more contrast all around. The main point that caught my eye were the long 'beeds' that held the fur in place. They just seemed a bit too smooth for the picture, and so I added some grain by increasing the opacity and decreasing the size of my brush and I stared dabbing away with lighter and darker shades of grey which gave some texture to the beeds, which I thought helped the image quite a bit. (See difference between figures 1.2 and 1.3)

At this point, it was getting late and I needed to begin on my other duties so I managed to just about finish the fur on top of the child's head and let it go there, hoping to continue the next day and finish the rest of the fur running down his back. But as we know, this did not happen. 

Figure 1.4

And here is the overall result of all my hard work on Monday afternoon. Now, if you compare this outcome in Figure 1.4 and Figure 1, you can see quite a difference in contrast all in all; Figure 1.4 is much darker and detailed overall. Fortunately, I am expecting the arrival of the real deal version of Painter X3 tomorrow, so I'm hoping to get some work done then.

Now, I just downloaded the Photoshop Elements on Saturday and I have to confess, it did not do much for me. I feel as though it's too simple and I need a little challenge even though I'm sure it has plenty in it if I'd just dig in a little further. After fiddling around for a bit and checking out the brushes, templates and filters I opened the Indian Child onto the software. This is what I saw:

You may think that this looks fine here and wonder what in earth am I talking about but I am telling you if you zoom into this picture above you can see all the rough edges and pixels that you cannot see in Painter. I don't know about you but I like my edges smooth and dandy.. I had followed the rules correctly in my mind, I had saved the indiankid.rif (Painter) file as a psd (Photoshop) file and most certainly not as a .jpg file so this confuses me very much. I have read if you save your file as a .jpg you may lose the quality in your work as you duplicate it but I haven't read anything on this. Anyway, this was a big turn off for me in this software and I don't feel to comfortable continuing my work on this.

Anyway, all in all it is an easy software to use and great if you are a beginner as myself in this field of digital art but as it has already been said, this software is made for photo editing and not image creating as I prefer. I'm still going to continue and get familiar with this software as far as I can before I get the Painter X3 in my hands. Wow, I didn't think I could have squeezed a post from this but apparently it is possible!